Unfortunately, there’s a very little flexibility built into almost any corporate culture. This stems from “dog eats dog” approach everyone is taking, since it’s enough to have one asshole on the team to convert “Happy family” into “Survival of the fittiest”.

Nevertheless, I came up to the management with the idea long known from totally different area. I suggested that management (namely VP of IS and whoever is immediately underneath him, supervising software development) would create a so-called DMZ – a “de-militarized zone” for projects.

The project would be dropped into DMZ queue (as opposed to regular software development queue) if its execution would take a significantly less time is the documentation workflow is skipped. For example – updating couple of words on web site, changing an image or something similar. There will not be many of them, so it does not pose any threat of being too large to manage and growing out of proportion. On the other hand – it will free up a lot of developer’s time that could be used somewhere else.